A general view inside Sednaya Prison, where thousands of people were said to be detained and tortured by the Assad regime over the last decade, on December 13, 2024 in Damascus, Syria.
| Photo Credit: Getty Images

The former head of a notorious Syrian prison was charged on Thursday (December 13, 2024) in the United States with torturing opponents of the now-collapsed government of Bashar al-Assad, the Justice Department said.

Samir Ousman Alsheikh, 72, who has been in the U.S. since 2020, allegedly ran Damascus Central Prison — known colloquially as Adra Prison — from approximately 2005 to 2008, where detainees were subjected to horrific abuse in the “Punishment Wing.”

The charges come days after Assad fled the country as his government crumbled, and as millions of Syrians begin a reckoning with decades of repression.

Alsheikh personally inflicted severe physical and mental pain on detainees, as well as ordering his staff to carry out such acts, US prosecutors said.

Under Alsheikh, prisoners were beaten while hung from the ceiling, or subjected to a device known as the “Flying Carpet,” which folded their bodies in half at the waist, causing excruciating pain and sometimes resulting in fractured spines.

“We are one step closer to holding him accountable for those heinous crimes. The United States will never be a safe haven for those who commit human rights abuses abroad,” said Eddy Wang, special agent in charge of the Homeland Security Investigations Los Angeles field office.

Alsheikh faces three counts of torture and one count of conspiracy to commit torture. He was arrested in July at the Los Angeles airport on separate immigration fraud charges.

If convicted, he could be jailed for up to 20 years for each of the torture charges.

The Justice Department said Alsheikh held a variety of positions in the Syrian police and the Syrian state security apparatus.

He was also associated with the Syrian Ba’ath Party that ruled the country, and had been appointed governor of the province of Deir Ez-Zour by Assad in 2011.

He moved to the United States in 2020 and applied for citizenship in 2023.

A simmering civil war in Syria erupted late last month with a lightning offensive spearheaded by the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group and its allies.

After racing through several major cities, the rebels quickly swept Damascus, sending Assad fleeing to Russia and bringing a sudden end to five decades of repressive rule by his clan.

Syrians have since flocked to prisons searching for missing loved ones.

Tens of thousands of people died of torture or as a result of the conditions of their detention in prisons under Assad’s rule since the civil war erupted in 2011, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Damascus stirred back to life on Monday (December 9, 2024) at the start of a hopeful but uncertain era after militants seized the capital and President Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia, following 13 years of civil war and more than 50 years of his family’s brutal rule.

Heavy traffic returned to the streets and people ventured out after a nighttime curfew, but most shops remained shut militants milled about in the centre.

Arrangements for a transitional government

The main militant commander Ahmed al-Sharaa, better known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, met overnight with Mr. Assad’s Prime Minister Mohammed Jalali and Vice-President Faisal Mekdad to discuss arrangements for a transitional government, a source familiar with the discussions said.

Al Jazeera television reported that the transitional authority would be headed by Mohamed Al-Bashir, who ran the administration in a small pocket of rebel-held territory before the 12-day lightning offensive that swept into Damascus.

Syria’s banks would reopen on Tuesday and staff had been asked to return to offices, according to a Syrian central bank source and two commercial bankers. Syria’s currency would continue to be used, they said.

Fighters from the remote countryside milled about in the capital, clustering in the central Umayyad Square before Damascus’s great eight-century mosque.

“We had a purpose and a goal and now we are done with it. We want the state and security forces to be in charge,” said Firdous Omar, who said he had been battling the Assad government since 2011 and was now looking forward to laying down his weapon and returning to his job as a farmer in provincial Idlib.

The advance of a militia alliance spearheaded by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a former al-Qaeda affiliate, was a generational turning point for West Asia.

It ends a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people, caused one of the biggest refugee crises of modern times and left cities bombed to rubble, swathes of countryside depopulated and the economy hollowed out by global sanctions. Millions of refugees could finally go home from camps across Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan.

Assad’s government collapse

Mr. Assad’s fall wipes out one of the main bastions from which Iran and Russia wielded power across the region. Turkiye, long aligned with Mr. Assad’s foes, emerges strengthened, while Israel hailed it as an outcome of its blows to Mr. Assad’s Iran-backed allies.

The Arab world faces the challenge of reintegrating one of West Asia’s central states, while containing the militant Sunni Islam that underpinned the anti-Assad revolt but has also metastasized into the horrific sectarian violence of Islamic State.

HTS is still designated as a terrorist group by the United Nations, but has spent years trying to soften its image to reassure foreign states and minority groups within Syria.

A New History

The group’s leader Jolani, who spent years in U.S. custody as an insurgent in Iraq but broke with al-Qaeda and Islamic State to align his movement with more mainstream anti-Assad groups, has vowed to rebuild Syria.

“A new history, my brothers, is being written in the entire region after this great victory,” he told a huge crowd at the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus on Sunday. With hard work Syria would be “a beacon for the Islamic nation”.

Mr. Assad’s Prime Minister Mr. Jalali told Sky New Arabia he was ready to provide documents and assistance for the transfer of power.

The fate of Syria’s Army would be “left to the brothers who will take over the management of the country’s affairs”, Jalali said. “What concerns us today is the continuation of services for Syrians.”

Political prisoners freed

Mr. Assad’s police state was known for generations as one of the harshest in West Asia, holding hundreds of thousands of political prisoners. On Sunday, elated inmates poured out of jails. Reunited families wept in joy. Newly freed prisoners were filmed running through the Damascus streets holding up their hands to show how many years they had been in prison.

The White Helmets rescue organisation said it had dispatched emergency teams to search for hidden underground cells still believed to hold detainees. One of the final areas to fall to the rebels was the Mediterranean coast, heartland of Mr. Assad’s Alawite sect and site of Russia’s naval base.

Looting took place in the coastal city of Latakia on Sunday but had subsided on Monday, residents said, with few people in the streets and shortages of fuel and bread.

Two Alawite residents said that so far the situation had panned out better than they had expected, seemingly without sectarian retribution against Alawites. One said a friend had been visited at home by rebel fighters who told him to hand over any weapons he had, which he did.

Near Latakia, rebels had yet to enter the Assad family’s ancestral village of Qardaha, site of a huge mausoleum for Assad’s father who took power in the 1960s. A resident said all senior figures tied to Assad and his rule had left.

“Only the poor are left here. The rich guys and thieves are gone,” he said.

The Kremlin said it was too early to know the future of Russia’s military bases in Syria, but it would discuss the issue with the new authorities.

Israel, U.S. launch strikes

Israel said Assad’s fall was a direct consequence of Israel’s punishing assault on Iran’s Lebanese allies Hezbollah, who had propped up Assad for years but were decimated since September by an Israeli air and ground campaign.

Since rebels entered Damascus, Israel has struck sites in Syria. Israeli officials said those air strikes would carry on for days, to keep Assad’s former arsenal out of hostile hands.

The Israeli military would “destroy heavy strategic weapons throughout Syria, including surface-to-air missiles, air defence systems, surface-to-surface missiles, cruise missiles, long-range rockets and coastal missiles,” Defence Minister Israel Katz said.

Israel has also pushed tanks over the border into a demilitarised buffer zone. On Monday the Israeli military published photos of its forces in the Mount Hermon border area.

The United States, which has 900 soldiers on the ground in Syria operating alongside Kurdish-led forces in the east, said its forces hit around 75 targets in air strikes against Islamic State camps and operatives on Sunday.

“There’s a potential that elements in the area, such as ISIS, could try to take advantage of this opportunity and regain capability… Those strikes were focused on those cells,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said during a visit to Japan.

The U.S.-backed Kurdish forces have clashed with Turkey-backed rebels in the north. A video, verified by Reuters, showed rebels entering the town of Manbij, captured from the Kurdish forces on Monday.

U.S. President Joe Biden speaks after Syrian rebels announced that they have ousted Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, at the White House, in Washington, U.S., December 8, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

President Joe Biden said on Sunday (December 8, 2024) that the sudden collapse of the Syrian government under Bashar Assad is a “fundamental act of justice” after decades of repression, but it was “a moment of risk and uncertainty” for the Mideast.

FOLLOW MORE: Syria war LIVE updates: Russia grants asylum to Assad and his family ‘on humanitarian grounds’

Speaking at the White House, Mr. Biden said the U.S. was not sure of Assad’s whereabouts, but was monitoring reports he was seeking refuge in Moscow.

Mr. Biden credited action by the U.S. and its allies for weakening Syria’s backers — Russia, Iran and Hezbollah. He said “for the first time” that they could no longer defend Assad’s grip on power.

“Our approach has shifted the balance of power in the Middle East,” Mr. Biden said.

Mr. Biden added that United States would engage with “all Syrian groups” over the political transition after the fall of president Bashar al-Assad.

“We will engage with all Syrian groups, including within the process led by the United Nations, to establish a transition away from the Assad regime toward independent, sovereign” Syria “with a new constitution.”

Joe Biden also warned that some of the rebel groups that ousted Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad have “their own grim record of terrorism,” adding that Washington would assess if they had moderated.

“Some of the rebel groups that took down Assad have their own grim record of terrorism and human right abuses,” Biden said in an address from the White House.

Mr. Biden added that the United States had “taken note” of recent statements by rebels suggesting they had since moderated, cautioning “we will assess not just their words, but their actions.”

The sudden collapse of the Syrian government under Bashar Assad is forcing the Biden administration and the incoming Trump team to confront intensifying questions about the possibility of greater conflicts across the Middle East.

People celebrate and ride motocycles in the Syrian southern city of Daraa on December 7, 2024, after the collapse of government forces. – Syria’s army said it was redeploying in two southern provinces on December 7
| Photo Credit: AFP

Syrian rebels announced they gained full control over the key city of Homs early on Sunday (December 8, 2024) after only a day of fighting, leaving President Bashar al-Assad’s 24-year rule dangling by a thread as insurgents marched on the capital, Damascus.

Thousands of Homs residents poured onto the streets after the army withdrew from the central city, dancing and chanting “Assad is gone, Homs is free” and “Long live Syria and down with Bashar al-Assad”.

FOLLOW MORE: Syria civil war LIVE updates: Syrian rebels announce full control over Homs; government forces withdraw

Rebels fired into the air in celebration, and youths tore down posters of the Syrian president, whose territorial control has collapsed in a dizzying week-long retreat by the military.

The fall of Homs gives the insurgents control over Syria’s strategic heartland and a key highway crossroads, severing Damascus from the coastal region that is the stronghold of Assad’s Alawite sect and where his Russian allies have a naval base and air base.

Homs’ capture is also a powerful symbol of the rebel movement’s dramatic comeback in the 13-year-old conflict. Swathes of Homs were destroyed by gruelling siege warfare between the rebels and the army years ago. The fighting ground down the insurgents, who were forced out.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham commander Abu Mohammed al-Golani, the main rebel leader, called the capture of Homs a historic moment and urged fighters not to harm “those who drop their arms”.

Rebels freed thousands of detainees from the city prison. Security forces left in haste after burning their documents.

The battle for control of the country is likely to turn quickly to the capital. Residents of numerous Damascus districts turned out to protest Assad on Saturday evening, and security forces were either unwilling or unable to clamp down.

Syrian rebel commander Hassan Abdul Ghani said in a statement early Sunday that operations were ongoing to “completely liberate” the countryside around Damascus and rebel forces were looking toward the capital.

In one suburb, a statue of Assad’s father, the late President Hafez al-Assad, was toppled and torn apart.

The Syrian army said it was reinforcing around Damascus, and state television reported on Saturday that Assad remained in the city.

Outside the city, rebels swept across the entire southwest over 24 hours and established control.